A Revolution in Insurgent Military Affairs? Neville Bolt's The Violent Image

The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries

By Neville Bolt

Columbia University Press

In The Violent Image Neville Bolt, a Teaching Fellow at Kings College London and a former BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and CBC Canada producer-director, sets out to redefine the Propaganda of the Deed (POTD) from its 19th Century roots and make it applicable to today's insurgents and terrorists (he uses these terms somewhat interchangeably, arguing that many terrorist groups, such as al Qaida, are global insurgencies). Bolt defines the original POTD as such: 

Initially the deed was an act of political violence aimed against state targets with the objective of goading the state into overreacting and using excessive force, thus losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the population, and securing revolution.  (24)

He contrasts this first concept with today's POTD: 

POTD is an act of political violence aimed against state targets with the objective of creating a media event capable of energising populations to bring about state revolution or social transformation. (24)

Bolt posits that this change in the insurgent's utility of violence has developed from acts that were primarily kinetic and symbolic to acts that are in reality strategic communications tools beyond their physical, tactical utility. There are five reasons for this development: globalization, mass migration and urbanization, the Digital Revolution, virtual social networks mapping onto traditional social networks, and the movement of politics into the media. 

The book is title The Violent Image because Bolt stresses the importance of images, stills over video, as a means to trigger emotions that change collective and collected memories such that are necessary to rewrite social understanding of political history. Pictures, he says, are more emotive than words, are conveniently ambiguous that they allow for different interpretations by different audiences, and cut across language barriers. There exists an 'Archipelago of Memories' (it seems his dissertation adviser was John Mackinlay after all) within societies that links memories and narratives. Actors with political primacy within societies have controlled the means of narrative, primarily through state-owned or -controlled media, and therefore have controlled the collective memory of the society. Insurgents attempt to provide an alternative narrative to create new memories sympathetic to their cause. Attempts that have been significantly facilitated by the digital revolution where media (narratives) are no longer one-to-many and are now many-to-many. Violent images are crucial to breaking down existing memories:

Insurgents connect these acts of violence in the minds of individuals and groups, to carefully crafted memories of grievance. Preparing the population is not simply about reinforcing ideology. It is about fracturing state and media memories - the status quo ante - and rooting violence in freshly constructed narratives, spawning a new revolutionary memory. (54)

To this point, Bolt provides an interesting history of Irish insurgent groups from 1798 until the present day where each new movement, whether nationalist, republican, Catholic, or socialist, has used propaganda to tie their group and cause to the earliest Irish insurgents. By drawing on more than a hundred years (at least for the most recent groups) these organizations created a memory of long-suffered grievance, even if their own objectives had little to anything in common with their predecessors. 

Insurgents, indeed any actor who uses propaganda, have the difficulty of speaking to many different audiences: fighters, local societies, diaspora societies, friendly governments, enemy governments, enemy fighters, etc. While the ambiguity of violent images allows them to use one image to speak to multiple audiences simultaneously, it is imperative the that narrative of their values remain unambiguous. This is something Western governments know all too well. There cannot be too big a gap between what you do and what you say. Insurgents use POTD, both minor and spectacular:

Minor events should resonate with each other, while spectaculars provide focal points that act as beacons within the landscape of revolutionary violence. (151)

Spectacular events in particular create fleeting points in time and space that provide the insurgent the capability to leverage their narratives while established media narratives waste the moment attempting to understand the "why" of the attacks through self-reflection. These are precious moments in building societal memories. 

Bolt provides two important lessons from all of this. First is that while the technologies that allow insurgents to propagate their narratives are not in themselves revolutionary, the changes in insurgent behavior of leveraging the technologies to disperse their narratives is, namely by the speed of dissemination (event to propaganda) and through many-to-many engagements. The second important lesson that Bolt draws is that insurgent organizations are increasingly, rightly in his opinion, using this new concept of POTD, leveraging the digital revolution, as a strategic operating concept that not only describes their military operations, but more significantly drives military operations so that tactical activities are determined by narrative and strategies of breaking down and building new memories. 

The Violent Image is a tour de force on the utility of violence for insurgent propaganda. Bolt lays out a coherent and engaging explanation of how and why insurgents and terrorists use violence towards political objectives. His arguments is straightforward and informative, if academically written, and we are better off having this work. Much ink has been spilled on the narrative aspects of insurgency and counterinsurgency, much of it useful, some of it not. Bolt's story is useful as it should help us understand the interaction of war and narrative better, even if it provides little in the way of recommendations to combat insurgent efforts to build new societal memories (which, of course, was not his intent; this is not a knock against the book). 

I certainly agree with Bolt that the POTD is and should be a operating concept that drives insurgent strategies (the term 'strategic operating concept' being an oxymoron in American military parlance).  However, my initial reaction to this book was to question whether this is evolutionary or revolutionary. What Bolt proposes is the story of a Revolution in Military Affairs with regard to insurgent warfare. A Revolution in Insurgent Military Affairs, a RIMA if you will.  The contrast is important. The study of war and its revolutions have focused almost solely upon great powers and conventional tactics and strategies. Discussions of the role of guerrilla warfare in this context center on how evolutions and revolutions in counterinsurgent forces enable those forces to better fight against insurgencies. The fact of the matter is that we do not have an academic reckoning of insurgencies such as we have for Western militaries. Our understanding of insurgencies has not progressed much past hit and run tactics, blending with the populations, the population is their target, and other such statements. These are not terribly useful in analyzing Bolt's thesis that his new POTD definition is revolutionary. 

To continue this line of analysis, POTD as a RIMA, we should examine what is meant by a Revolution in Military Affairs. A perfectly good definition was provided by Peter Singer in his Wired for War:

RMAs typically involve the introduction of a new technology or organization, which in turn creates a whole new model of fighting and winning wars. A new weapon is introduced that makes obsolete all the previous best weapons, such as what armored, steam-powered warships did to wooden, wind-powered warships. (Singer, 181)

There is no question that the digital revolution brought about new technologies that have affected warfare. Indeed, insurgent groups have even reorganized themselves to better leverage these technologies. But are these actions revolutionary with regard to insurgent warfare? Have they created a "whole new model of fighting and winning wars"? 

Insurgents have use propaganda as long as we have been recording such things. Even Clausewitz himself acknowledges that the insurrectionist's center of gravity is popular support (we'll ignore for the moment that he still then proscribes the destruction of the enemy force as essential). During his lengthy discourse on Irish insurgencies, Bolt writes at length about their leveraging propaganda. The connection of violence to propaganda has been the hallmark of terrorist groups for at least a century, and likely before that, either to generate grievance from heavy-handed governments or to demonstrate their group's military competence.

I believe that an element of skepticism of the revolutionary aspect of Bolt's thesis is his definition of the POTD from a century ago. He links the violent act to government overreaction; a judo throw that causes widespread outrage that creates social transformation. But what are these events other than media events? How were insurgents able to spread public outrage? In the case of Ireland it was through pamphlets and underground newspapers. I would argue that insurgent intents and the mechanisms to bring their objectives to reality have not fundamentally changed since, merely the speed and reach of messaging. Indeed, speed and reach provided by digital means are necessary to counteract global migrations that would in earlier times have been local audiences to insurgent groups. Audiences that had been well within the effective range of a well written and illustrated newsletter. 

There are numerous ways to analyze this excellent book and as a military thinker and writer I chose to approach it as a second track of military affairs. I do not find what Bolt describes as creating a whole new way of fighting and winning wars. Propaganda, rooted in violent imagery to evoke emotions that break down and recreate societal memories of grievance, has benefited from the digital revolution in an evolutionary manner, not revolutionary. It is not a RIMA, even if it may drive more 'traditional' forces towards their own RMAs to combat the POTD. That said, this type of analysis would be well served by more in-depth study of insurgencies over time, such as we have for Western militaries.

The point of evolutionary or revolutionary advancement does not degrade this book in any way. It is exceptionally informative in describing how and why our current and potential adversaries use violence beyond tactical gains and into symbolic strategic gains by way of propaganda. Any student of modern warfare, insurgency, and terrorism would do themselves well by reading and keeping The Violent Image handy and I congratulate Dr Bolt for creating this significant work. 

DO NOT DARE COUNTENANCE VIOLENT, COERCIVE ACTION AGAINST US!

I'm not going to pretend like I know much of the details behind the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. I'm not going to add to the din of people commenting and analyzing and speculating and advocating. All I'm going to say is that this passage from Steve Clemons pretty much sums up a whole lot of what's behind the recent debate about the defense budget, force structure, national security strategy, etc.:

This is a serious situation -- and this kind of assassination is the sort that could lead to an unexpected cascade of events that could draw the US and other powers into a consequential conflagration in the Middle East.

If Iran was indeed willing to attack a Saudi Ambassador and close confidante of the Saudi King on US soil and countenance the death of 100-150 Americans, then the US has reached a point where it must take action. 

The President's National Security Council and intelligence teams led by Thomas Donilon must construct a response that is "more than reactive."  This is time for a significant strategic response to the Iran challenge in the Middle East and globally -- and if the US does not take action, then the Saudis will most likely retaliate in ways that will escalate the stakes and tensions with Iran throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.

If Iran was willing to countenance... Let's put this in plain words: Steve Clemons is saying that the United States ought to muster "a significant strategic response" -- presumably involving direct action by intelligence agencies or military force -- to the apparent revelation that a regional power on the other side of the globe might even consider aggressive action against U.S. and allied interests.

No wonder we need a $700 billion defense budget: some of us are planning strike operations at the hint of an anti-American plan.

My non-reflection on 9/11

You can take a million different angles on the anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, and I'm pretty sure all of them have been presented in some form or another over the last week. I'm not going to subject you to a cynic's screed about the pointlessness and opportunism of all this coverage (even though I've certainly had strong feelings about that from time to time), and I'm not going to go the other direction and engage in emotional nationalism or policy retrospective. For me, the most important reflections are those by the people who lost friends or family, and I think the policy clutter has drowned out much of that meaningful remembrance.

That said, I want to point you to what I think is the best thing written this weekend about our national reaction to terrorism since 9/11: Spencer Ackerman's Danger Room piece called "How to Beat Terrorism: Refuse to Be Terrorized." I'm not going to spend any time going in to all the reasons why I agree, or trying to bolster Spencer's points; we can do that another time, when things aren't so emotional. But you ought to read it and perhaps reflect for just a moment on exactly what "security" means. For me, it means having the national confidence not to lose our collective mind in response to the painful (if fundamentally meaningless) jabs of disaffected hermits -- not to gulp down (and even beg for) a medicine that's far worse than the disease.

Military medics: protected or not?

Gulliver's post yesterday on the definition of terrorism started a very interesting Twitter conversation about the delineation between terrorism targets and legitimate military targets. This led to the discussion of legitimacy of targeting military medical personnel. On the one hand, these personnel are protected under the Geneva Conventions and tradition among state combatants. On the other hand, they aid the war effort by getting combatants back into the fight and recently have been armed, ostensibly for self-defense given the increased disregard for their protected status in recent decades. Arming them tends to un-blur their status towards combatant, in my opinion, but I'm certainly not one deny them their right to defend themselves. As Petulant Skeptic noted last night, they are all soldiers first.

I'm not up on all of the literature on this topic, save the basics in the Geneva Conventions that I was taught many years ago. So what I'd thought I'd do is provide my perspective on how I saw medical personnel treated on both sides during the course of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

U.S. Medical Troops - Equipment and Markings

Being a brand new LT, I can only really speak about the forward medical personnel in my troop and Squadron Aid Station. I saw a Corps Support Hospital in Camp before we went to our tactical assembly areas, but not enough to comment on what happened to them once we launched over the berm. Anyway, the medical personnel in our squadron consisted of one platoon for the Aid Station, including a Medical Service Corps platoon leader, physician's assistant and a doctor (we were lucky to have a gynecologist for our battalion surgeon - but to be fair, he was a very good doc), who were equipped with light-skinned M998 HMMWVs, HMMWV ambulances (for transport and the nomenclature of which I don't know), M577s (for treatment), and M113s (for transport). We also had one section of medics in each of the ground troops (not sure what the air troops had) which were three medics in a M113. None of the medical vehicles had crew served weapons, and only the M577s and M113s were marked with red crosses. The personnel were not marked as a medical personnel in any way and carried a personnel weapon - usually rifles for the medics and pistols for the doc, PA, and PL. Other than their vehicle being marked, once the medics got off of their track, there was no way to discern them from other soldiers.

Iraq Medical Troops - Equipment and Markings

I didn't see a single Iraqi military medic or vehicle. Even in longer battles (which lasted up to four days), we never saw any Iraqi soldiers try to get to and help their buddies out. This isn't a condemnation on their bravery, it's just quite possible they didn't have any medical staff to do this. Or if they were like our medics and not marked, then we would have shot them at first site as a legitimate military target and not knowing what they were there for. We treated the Iraqis we could (I'm guessing follow-on units did more of this - we were often moving to fast to assess battle damage).

U.S. Policies on Engaging Military Medical Personnel/Equipment

The policy was we don't do that as signatories of the 1949 Conventions. If we identified injured Iraqis, Iraqi medical staff of personnel, we were not to engage them. As I mentioned above, we never had to test this theory. But here's where things became difficult: civilian ambulances. At first we left these along as civilian and therefore not targets - their medical status gave them extra protection. And then the Saddam Fedayeen started using them to pace out artillery distances and in a couple of cases as car bombs. As a leader, it was difficult to ensure the protected status of the Red Crescent when the soldiers were a little scared of them, but the policy was then to restrict their movement until their legitimacy could be verified. But they were protected from engagement.

Iraqi Army Policies on Engaging Military Medical Personnel/Equipment

Of course, we never saw the memos, but as far as the Republican Guard and Saddam Fedayeen were concerned as indicated by their actions, not only were medical vehicles legit targets in spite of their great big red crosses, they were preferred targets because they were light skinned and lightly armed. It was also a huge morale let down to see an ambulance get hit, because if there were any casualties, they'd have be taken out of fire by something needed in that fight. I should also note that once our soldiers were dismounted, I doubt the Iraqis could have discerned medical from combat arms soldiers, if they cared anyway.

Here's the big so what that I get from all of this. The U.S. will always consider military medical personnel and equipment as protected on the battlefield and will not willfully engage them. We belong to the gentlemen's club of war because we can afford to. The U.S. also understands that our adversaries will not be so "civilized" on this topic and will not afford our medical personnel and equipment protected status, if not actively find and target them. So we've armed our guys to defend themselves and let our combat arms guys do their best to protect them by force. It's not quite fair, but this is the case. So are military medical personnel protected? If you're the big kid on the block, they are because you can afford to make that discernment. If you're the underdog, everything is fair game - and there's a good argument of medical personnel as legitimate military targets. But to call attacks against military medical personnel, equipment, or facilities as "terrorism" would be a stretch from an active imagination.

Is this definition of terrorism analytically useless?

Under the heading "20 years of terror," The Economist has a graph mapping global "terrorism" deaths since 1991. The one-year high topped out at nearly 13,000; the trough was around 3,000. The most lethal single incident over that period, of course, was 9/11, but the 2,996 dead were nearly half of an annual total near the 20-year mean. Have a look:

What's most interesting to me, though, is the definition used by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (!), who compiled the data: for them, terrorism is "the use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal."

On its face, that's a little goofy; after all, economic, religious, and social goals are fundamentally political, too. (Presumably a "religious goal" means something roughly like an attempt to advance the social or political status of one's sect, not the performance of some divinely-mandated act of violence, right?) But worse than that, doesn't this definition allow for the inclusion of deaths attributable to insurgency and rebellion? Or organized crime? Maybe I'm just picking semantic nits here, but as the lexicographers say, words mean something.

What's the most useful and accurate definition of terrorism you've seen? Maybe you've got one of your own...?

(Hat-tip to Peter J. Munson on Twitter for the link.)

Is there anything more strategically idiotic than "we're at war, so we must fight and win"?

This isn't exactly new ground, but I'm reminded of the rationality-annihilating centrality-of-victory types by a line from Elliott Abrams' embarrassing defense of Dick Cheney in a Foreign Policy roundtable on the former VP.

Cheney fervently believed that America was at war after 9/11, and this belief led him to the conclusion that America must fight and win.

"Fight and win," eh? Ok, sure, let's fight and win. But fight against whom? To win what? What is winning, exactly, in this context? Is it the destruction of every al-Qaeda terrorist? The democratization of the Middle East? The elimination of every possible threat to American security? I'd love to see the campaign plan for this "war," or at least for someone to outline desired end-states.

For a good long while in history, the general consensus held that destruction of the enemy's main force was the sure path to victory in war. There are a million good reasons that Clausewitz and Jomini and Napoleon and Mahan alike believed this, and I'm not going to recount them all here. (It's also worth remembering that each one of those dudes would've snickered and turned up his nose at the idea that any interaction the world's foremost power had with a band of violent criminals from the extremist fringe could constitute "war.") But one needs to try to understand that view in its historical and circumstantial context: it's not a timeless law of war, but rather a reality of the characteristically limited nature of war in their era. Routing the enemy in the field didn't constitute victory on its own merits, but was rather so closely tied to the political change that secured actual victory (accomplishment of policy objectives) as to be nearly indistinguishable. 

Everyone knows the old saw about winning a battle but losing the war, right? The point of that maxim is that tactical decision doesn't always translate into operational or strategic success. This is so obvious and widely understood as to barely merit comment. Why does it so often happen, then, that politicians and military leaders alike express sentiments like the one from Abrams cited above? Why do so many people fail to understand that military victory, however defined (and you'll have a hell of a hard time defining it for me in a "war" against a phenomenon of political violence), is essentially meaningless unless it forces political-strategic decision?

Am I missing something here? (More on development and security)

In an essay on Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel, Nancy Birdsall and two colleagues from the Center for Global Development argue for a new American approach to Pakistan assistance. They argue that a focus on security, failure to articulate clear objectives, and lack of transparency about how money is being spent have doomed the U.S. aid program there to failure. Indonesia is held out as an example of what Pakistan might become with more effective U.S. engagement.

Now, that nation is mentioned in the same breath as Brazil and India as an emerging power on the world stage and a force for regional security. Fundamentally, few threats to American interests and American lives now emanate from Indonesia. That is the hope and the promise of development in Pakistan, a promise the United States has a role to play in fulfilling. [emphasis added]

To which I can only respond: uh, what? Surely Birdsall and her colleagues are familiar with Jemaah Islamiyah, right?

Development and democracy haven't solved the problem of extremist violence in Indonesia, and it seems unlikely they'll do so in Pakistan. But viewing these two countries solely through the lens of terrorism misses the point. Birdsall et al are correct to write that "Pakistan's stability and prosperity are intertwined with the United States' own," and to note that this linkage is tighter than that with other countries. This isn't about terrorism, though -- it's about Pakistan's status as a nuclear weapons state, a seriously flawed democracy, and a nexus of fundamentally revisionist (that is, anti-status quo) Islamic extremism.

Pakistan can pose a threat to the U.S. both by being too strong and too weak, something that doesn't hold for Indonesia. It's not clear that state weakness is the cause of the "threats to American interests and American lives [that] now emanate from" Pakistan; policymakers should be cognizant of that reality before they spend money trying to replicate the Indonesian model (which, lest we forget, was achieved with minimal U.S. assistance).

This is yet another example of the sort of absurdities we're driven to by the insensate state-strength-as-security paradigm: the goofy quasi-assertion that with just a bit of well-targeted aid, we can make Pakistan as unthreatening to American interests as Indonesia.

This is what happens when you drink too much coffee and your girlfriend has to work late

I'm not really a terrorism guy, as I think most people know. But I've been reading and thinking about both the causes and objectives of terroristic violence lately, particularly the way that governmental authority and state capacity intersect with individual freedom and factional grievance.

Another interesting idea to me is the way that terrorism as we understand it today is a quite recent and short-lived phenomenon: terror was (in the words of Conor Gearty) "hardly ever to be found in any century up to and including the nineteenth" and simply "was not part of the equation of revolt." This was to some extent a matter of the technologies both of violence and of communication, but it was also a factor of the relationship between government and disaffected petitioner: the would-be terrorist lacked the means to inflict sufficient damage or to spread the message of his success, and in most places the state had no qualms about brutally quashing rebellion or dissent. To put it simply, terrorism didn't exist because it wouldn't have worked.

I'm also fascinated by a certain irony implicit in our 21st-century return to a more expansive definition of terrorism. It may sound absurd to state it in this fashion, but until very recently, terror was the fundamental, critical component to any definition of "terrorism"; violence outside of war was only unambiguously classed as terrorism when it was both politically subversive and indiscriminate -- when its intent was to create real public terror at its seeming randomness and insensitivity to the distinction between citizen and government. I'm not interested in having a drawn-out semantic argument about this, but it's curious the way we often refer to the 9/11 hijackers and to an Afghan who emplaces an IED alike as "terrorists." The aforementioned irony is in the fact that "pure terror" -- that is, indiscriminate violence intended to send a political message -- is less comprehensible to us for its apparent disconnection from the expressed objective just as it terrifies us more. The targeted violence most likely to actually influence policy directly tends more toward political subversion and irregular warfare. Terrorism is, in a sense, becoming less terrifying.

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about. And then I drew this:

(Click to make it bigger.) No, it doesn't make very much sense. No, I can't really tell you what the hell I was trying to accomplish when I drew it. No, I'm not going to type out all the captions and clarifying remarks. Yes, I want you to examine it and tell me how useless it is, and how very stupid you think I am, and how I ought to just stop trying to make everything into a damn graph already just because I've been reading a lot about Tufte this week.

Just for the record, the two meaningful lines are the straight line slope running from bottom-left to top-right, which is labeled "susceptibility to mitigation by direct government action," and the dipping arc with red trim, labeled "vulnerability of high-functioning state." I guess the idea was to show the way that different purported root causes of terrorism could be mitigated, and to think about how important state strength is to those various forms of mitigation. Terrorist violence that is motivated by an overwhelming desire for substantive policy change, for example, would be insensitive to state strength (just as likely to occur in a strong state as in a weak one) while comparatively "simple" to mitigate or avoid through concrete, direct action by the government (politically unpalatable as that may be). On the other end of the spectrum you have sociopathic or nihilistic terrorism (which, again, is no less likely in a high-functioning state than a failed one), a type of random and truly terror-inspiring violence that the government is virtually powerless to proactively suppress. [Here I think of the Michael Caine character's quote in one of the recent Batman movies: "Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."]

Hm, whoa, look at the time! Two questions for you:

1) Is there any chance that this graphic says anything meaningful to you, has any explanatory power, or provides any insight whatsoever (beyond "Gulliver is an asshole with too much time on his hands")?

2) What's wrong with it, from the perspective of conceptual accuracy?

The awesome prescience of obscure, misplaced books

A couple of days ago, I noticed a skinny little paperback on my bookshelf, one I surely hadn't opened in 15 years despite its persistent presence in various packing piles and moving boxes. It's called Terror, written by an Irishman named Conor Gearty and published (only in Britain, so far as I can tell) by Faber and Faber in 1991. I probably picked it up in a shop in Pontypridd around '94 (it should come as no surprise that I was a book nerd even as a pre-teen), back when terrorism was a considerably less fashionable subject, and read it alongside Tim Pat Coogan's more popular work on the IRA.

Gearty's book is pretty tough to find nowadays, and I wonder how many people more conversant in the terrorism literature than I are familiar with it. (?) One might reasonably assume that a book on terrorism written at the end of the Cold War wouldn't have a tremendous amount to teach us after the events of the last decade; hell, part of the reason I took the book up again was a somewhat ungenerous curiosity about how the whole thing held up. I've just begun to read it again, but this bit in the introduction jumped out at me:

Politicians have not been slow to talk of terrorism in a vocabulary of fear previously reserved exclusively for communism. In the first twenty years [Gearty's talking here about the late 1960s to late 1980s], the subject shared its language with the old enemy. General Gadaffi may have been the 'mad dog', but the Soviet Union remained firmly entrenched as the 'evil empire'. Now, however, the death of communism in eastern Europe and its imminent decline in China [!] has left the field of fear clear for terrorism. Recently an undercurrent of anti-Islamic and anti-Arab sentiment has crept into the debate. The Muslim faith stands out as the one remaining alternative to Western values. [!] So it is hardly surprising that it -- or the terrorists it is said to sponsor -- should have drifted into the space once filled by Stalin and his advocates of world domination. If Senator McCarthy were alive today, his questions would be about mosques, not membership.

Hm, quite. (The emphasis is mine.) Remember, this was written in 1991. To think how different the world was then!

The first chapter of the book also has a useful discussion of the definition and vocabulary of terrorism, a subject that has been nearly exhausted in this first part of the 21st century (though I'm not sure we've gotten any good answers). It's interesting to see the assertion two decades ago that "at times... it has seemed as if the idea of terrorism has reached the point where it can now be said to embrace subversive violence anywhere in the world." Who could have imagined how much more expansive our definition would soon become?

I'm sure there will be more noteworthy highlights as I move through the book, and I may share them, but this seemed too prescient to pass up.

EDIT: Here's one I somehow forgot to include yesterday:

If we see their ambitions as low-level or short-term, it is evident that deliberate terror does sometimes work. Terror has after all achieved the release of convicted prisoners from European and Israeli jails. It has led to political concessions which have been made as a way of bringing some crisis or another to a successful resolution. It has forced responses from liberal democratic governments which are out of all proportion, in terms of money spent and human resources allocated, to the mischief it creates; it is only necessary to spend a couple of hours in an international airport to see how a few killers have transformed one whole substructure of the modern world, and in a way which reminds every passenger of the possibility of attack (even though in statistical terms it is too remote to be worthy of notice).

Emphasis, again, is mine. The way airports adapted to a threat of hijacking and other terrorism in the 1980s seems almost quaint to the post-9/11 observer, doesn't it?

The legend of COIN as essential CT enabler: the bin Laden exemplum

Spencer wrote a thoughtful post last week on a question I'm surprised hadn't been brought up earlier: does the bin Laden raid tell us anything about the legitimacy of past claims that a large-footprint counterinsurgent force on the ground in Afghanistan is essential to collecting the kind of solid, reliable local intelligence we need to wage effective operations against al-Qaeda? Take it away, Attackerman:

So the bin Laden raid leaves us with an empirical test case for a core counterinsurgency contention.

Proposed by Dave Kilcullen and others, counterinsurgency theorists argue that theirs is the truer path to robust counterterrorism, the pursuit of which is the only reason counterinsurgency is germane in the U.S. context. Counterterrorism requires intelligence on terrorists and their environs. Intelligence requires local knowledge. Local knowledge requires the protection of vulnerable populations from reprisal, plus some incentive -- money, justice, political access, whatever -- to make cooperation with the anti-insurgent faction sensible. If you don't provide those resources and meet people where they are, then your counterterrorism hunt is fruitless. 

U.S. counterterrorism just succeeded, massively, in a place where we don't have a counterinsurgency campaign. But we clearly had sufficient local knowledge (read: informers and ground operatives) -- plus signals intelligence, plus persistant surveillance -- to meet our objective.

This seems like a pretty simple deal, right? Let's reformulate what Spencer has written in the simplest possible terms:

1. Some COIN advocates sold their operational approach by saying that it involves the collection of intelligence that enables accomplishment of the primary national objective, which is the destruction of al-Qaeda and its associated movements. 


2. A significant step towards the accomplishment of that objective was achieved in a manner that suggests that the COIN campaign in Afghanistan did not meaningfully contribute. 


3. As such, we should reconsider whether the massive expense, reduced operational readiness, and other sacrifices being made to enable that COIN campaign are actually essential to accomplishment of the fundamental goal; i.e. is the war in Afghanistan really accomplishing anything vis-a-vis the president's stated objective, which is, lest we forget, to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda"?

This isn't going to come as a shock to you, but I completely agree with all of that. I agree with the line of thinking. I agree with the need for re-assessment. (To be more accurate, I think the assessment -- whether or not our ways and means can meaningfully contribute to the accomplishment of our ends -- should have been done and then explained and justified to the American people before the escalation too place, because it's not as if these concerns are new (pdf)... but we all know how that went.) I agree that this should serve as a kick in the ass for policymakers to genuinely think about why we're fighting the war in Afghanistan and what benefits we're reaping in exchange for its various costs. Agree with all of that. But the original post actually requires a little bit of semantic parsing, because the COIN pitch made by escalation advocates was multi-layered, sophisticated, and not vulnerable to a single point of failure. So let's take a second to get some details straight.

During the debate over possible courses of action that preceded the president's announcement of an escalation, the various positions were basically boiled down to "CT," "CT-plus," and "COIN." I'm not going to rehash the details of all of that, because it's boring and you almost certainly already know the broad strokes. (If not, read this.) But!: one of many, many insidious effects of that simplification was the way that "counterterrorism" or "CT" came in the popular lexicon to mean something like targeted direct action against terrorist networks, personnel, and support infrastructure -- i.e. killing terrorists -- without what constitutes the other half of that definition in military doctrine: "action taken indirectly to influence and render global and regional environments inhospitable to terrorist networks." Now, it may be the case that the DOD definition is too broad to be meaningful, and you could certainly make that argument. But by this definition and according to the justification of the mission provided by Presidents Bush and Obama, any USG activities undertaken in Afghanistan would constitute "counterterrorism"... including COIN, FID, SFA, development assistance, economic support, etc etc ad infinitum.

Now take another look at Spencer's post in this light. "Counterinsurgency theorists argue that theirs is the truer path to robust counterterrorism, the pursuit of which is the only reason counterinsurgency is germane in the U.S. context." He goes on to explain the presumed linkage between security to governmental capacity to popular loyalty to local knowledge to actionable intelligence, which serves to clarify what he really meant by "the truer path to robust counterterrorism": COIN ops will presumably result in military forces getting more information about the environment and the enemy than they otherwise would have (without sustained on-the-ground presence), meaning you can kill more terrorists this way.

I want to vigorously dispute Spencer's characterization of this questionable (and opportunistic) corollary as "a core counterinsurgency contention." What we see here is a cunning conflation of two superficially plausible semi-truths: 1) persistent, visible, dispersed presence by counterinsurgent security forces will enable the accumulation of local knowledge that is essential to effectively targeting insurgent cadres and thus enabling the broader counterinsurgency effort, and 2) the local knowledge that's accumulated as a result of sustained presence and security will include intelligence that allows the counterinsurgent force to undertake targeted, effective offensive operations against al-Qaeda terrorists (whose numbers in the Afghan AO are infinitesimal if not zero).

It's only fair to further note that when Spencer writes "the pursuit of [counterterrorism] is the only reason counterinsurgency is germane in the U.S. context," he's engaging in a bit of selective memory (or revisionist history). Many advocates for escalation and a broad-based COIN effort in Afghanistan were proponents of a widely-held view in both liberal internationalist and neoconservative circles, one that has only recently -- with a downturn in popular support and enthusiasm for overseas adventurism -- started to recede from the public forum: faith in what we can call the "state strength" paradigm. They believe(d?) that weak states posed the greatest threat to global and national security, that poverty, disenfranchisement and lack of economic opportunity not only drove local conflicts, but threatened Americans' way of life. Here's how it's pitched (pdf):

We know where extremists thrive. In conflict zones that are incubators of resentment and anarchy. In weak states that cannot control their borders or territory, or meet the basic needs of their people. From Africa to central Asia to the Pacific Rim – nearly 60 countries stand on the brink of conflict or collapse. The extremists encourage the exploitation of these hopeless places on their hate-filled websites.

In this telling, poor economic conditions and injustice stoke disaffection and rage while weak governments are insufficiently capable of taking steps to either ameliorate these conditions or control their disaffected populations, and the whole thing ends up with pissed-off foreigners flying airplanes into office buildings. In short, they believed that failed states created terrorists, and that the best way to fix these failed states would be to build governmental capacity through a wide-ranging nation assistance and state-building effort while taking direct military action to defeat the most immediately dangerous security threats... what's been called, in the imprecise shorthand of our political narrative, "COIN."

In a defense and foreign-policy establishment where this worldview predominates, almost to the exclusion of all others, is it fair to say that "the pursuit of [robust counterterrorism] is the only reason counterinsurgency is germane in the U.S. context"? I would argue that it isn't the only reason, and that Kilcullen et al's focus on the CT-enabler angle was merely a matter of opportunistic calculation to appeal to those few "realists" who may not have fully bought into the contemporary conventional wisdom. The real challenge doesn't come from such obviously inadequate policy justifications as the narrowly-circumscribed one that Spencer seeks to highlight, but rather from the undifferentiated monolith that is the state-strength paradigm. It is close to a fact of political science that the risk of civil violence is closely correlated with low per-capita GDP/quality of life (as Jay Ulfelder points out today in a fortuitously-timed post). But it is far more difficult to establish causation, and causation is what we need to understand if we want to bring policy instruments to bear on a security problem. Consider just a few of the multivariate assumptions about the causes of conflict and violence that are embedded in the state-strength paradigm.

Violence is caused by: poverty; unequal access to or distribution of resources; unemployment; the inability of the justice system to fairly adjudicate disputes; the inability of the police to enforce the writ of the state; the inability of security forces to maintain the monopoly of violence; the inability of security forces to defend borders/sovereignty/protect against outside influence and/or infiltration of adversarial elements; the inability of security forces to undertake and/or sustain effective offensive operations against identified targets such as terrorists or insurgent groups; etc.

Some of these may be true, some specious, and some outright absurd. But the lumping of these many purported causes, drivers, or enablers of conflict under one broad rubric -- "state weakness/failure" -- has allowed for that paradigm's furtherance through unified (or at least complementary) advocacy by disparate power bases and interest groups: DoD can talk about the requirement to build capacity and capabilities in partner security forces in order to defend borders and eliminate safe havens; while State can emphasize the need to build whole-of-government capacity with a specific focus on the institutions of justice and so on; and USAID and the development community can pitch the imperative of improving the delivery of basic assistance to address human suffering, economic inequality, and other purportedly fundamental drivers of conflict.

This is how we end up with a sort of meta-COIN, a universalization of vague and arguably specious tactical principles to the level of foreign policy: a global emphasis on development, the effective provision of goods and services, and capacity-building (both in governance and security); counterterrorism in the very most literal interpretation of the definition, emphasizing both the indirect actions that influence and render global and regional environments inhospitable to terrorist networks (economic development, conflict resolution, civil governance capacity-building) plus direct action against terrorist networks... but the easier and cheaper version: direct action by partner security forces (military assistance, foreign internal defense, security force capacity-building). And then you've still got the ultimate trump card in reserve: direct military action by U.S. forces, which Kilcullen insists is basically the worst-case, avoid-at-almost-all-costs scenario.

What I'm getting at is this: while advocates of escalation in Afghanistan may have used the troop presence ---> security ---> popular confidence ---> actionable intelligence ---> direct action against terrorists rationale to help justify their preferred operational approach, it's hard to imagine they were being totally serious and/or honest with themselves. (How were COIN ops in Afghanistan going to provide actionable intelligence about terrorist networks and individuals that reside almost exclusively in Pakistan?) Most COIN advocates are (were?) also believers in the bigger idea, the state-strength paradigm; they saw COIN as a means of sanctuary denial, as an extended process through which Afghan society would be inoculated against the threat of insurgency and by extension, al Qaeda influence. And state-strengthening is/was the answer for Pakistan, and Yemen, and Somalia, and... everywhere, right?

What's wrong with all that, then? Well, the whole concept might be totally bogus, for one thing. We don't really understand the root causes of civil violence, even at the sub-national level. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of civil violence, and localized insurgency with a terrorist component is very, very different to international terrorism (even if you want to identify that as a component of "global insurgency" (pdf)). We can't say why, for example, one country's contentious social issues spark civil war, while those of a similar country do not, at least not with any real certainty... and that question isn't half as complicated as why some disaffected individuals choose to engage in international terrorism against a distant adversary, one that is almost certainly unconnected in any clear way to whatever tangible, material grievances that individual may have, while others join a political party or a local insurgency or just do a lot of drugs. And that's something we ought to think about before we decide to re-order our foreign and security policy around the imperatives of global development, state strength, and capacity-building. There may be plenty of good reasons to prioritize state strength, but it's not totally clear that counterterrorism justifies it.

To parrot Spencer: Let's consider this, shall we?

Does not compute

The president has consistently reassured us that Afghanistan is vital to American national security because our involvement there is the only way to be sure a reconstituted al-Qaeda is unable to stage a catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil. I'm not the only one who's been hearing this, right? For just one example, here's what President Obama said last December in announcing the Afghan escalation:

I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards, and al Qaeda can operate with impunity. We must keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region.

He repeated the sentiment just weeks ago during his Oval Office speech on the Iraq drawdown:

And no challenge is more essential to our security than our fight against al Qaeda.

Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11. Now, as we approach our 10th year of combat in Afghanistan, there are those who are understandably asking tough questions about our mission there. But we must never lose sight of what's at stake. As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We will disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists.

So I was surprised to see this in today's Morning Defense:

OVERNIGHT ALERT FROM THE POST –Woodward’s book, due out Monday, describes the administration as “barraged” with terrorist warnings on U.S. soil. But Obama told Woodward: “We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever... we absorbed it and we are stronger.”

I think we all understand the political realities involved in this, and there's no doubt the president would suffer terrible consequences if he were to be seen admitting that terrorism is a danger we simply have to learn to live with. But when I think about what we can "absorb" and about the president's stated belief that "we are stronger" after having suffered through the consequences of 9/11, it makes me wonder whether we're stronger for the $70B we're spending annually in Afghanistan, or for the thousand-plus U.S. lives that have been lost there, or for the consequences of our involvement there like reduced flexibility in our land forces, physical and psychological strain across the force, and the eroded moral force that accompanies a superpower being seen as a vanquished occupier.

If we could "absorb" another 9/11, then WTF are we doing in Afghanistan? (For whatever it's worth, I'm not the only one wondering.)

Can we just take a second to reflect on how freaking stupid this is?

Here's the Times yesterday on the debate going on in the USG about a military aid package intended for Yemen:

Senior State Department and American military officials are deeply divided over the pace and scale of military aid to Yemen, which is emerging as a crucial testing ground for the Obama administration’s approach to countering the threat from Al Qaeda.

As the terrorism network’s Yemen branch threatens new attacks on the United States, the United States Central Command has proposed supplying Yemen with $1.2 billion in military equipment and training over the next six years, a significant escalation on a front in the campaign against terrorism, which has largely been hidden from public view.

The aid would include automatic weapons, coastal patrol boats, transport planes and helicopters, as well as tools and spare parts. Training could expand to allow American logistical advisers to accompany Yemeni troops in some noncombat roles.

[. . .]

The Yemen quandary reflects the uncertainty the administration faces as it tries to prevent a repeat of the Dec. 25 attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner by a Nigerian man trained in Yemen. American officials say a central role in preparing the attack was played by Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric now hiding with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the network’s branch in Yemen.

A dude tried to get on an airplane in the U.S. with a bomb in his pants, and this is causing confusion about whether to give a country on the other side of the planet ONE POINT TWO BILLION DOLLARS in helos, patrol boats, and small arms.

Let's just reflect for a second on the stupidity of this.

Ok, cool.

Now go read Paul Pillar on this. I was planning to write something a little more involved when I came across his post, and he's way smarter than me.

Pillar's use of the term "perfect security" made me think about a very brief essay David Foster Wallace wrote three years ago on the meaning of 9/11. James Fallows linked to it last week, and it's worth sharing again. Wallace made a point that I've often made over the last several years: perhaps exposing ourselves to the risk of personal harm or death at the hands of violent extremists is just one of the many uncomfortable trade-offs we're forced to make to enjoy the benefits of a free society. I'm going to reproduce his essay here in full, because it's worth reading and because I think excerpting him tends to rob the text of some of the je ne sais quoi that made Wallace perhaps the most enjoyable read in the English language.

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

FOOTNOTES:

1. Given the strict Gramm-Rudmanewque space limit here, let's just please all agree that we generally know what this term connotes—an open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency ... the whole democratic roil.

2. (This phrase is Lincoln's, more or less)

Re-reading this last week made me feel sad, both at the way our politics make Wallace's point fundamentally un-sayable for those from whom it would be most meaningful, and for the fact that last weekend marked the two-year anniversary of the virtuoso's suicide.

Making excuses (Or: How national security politics has killed the blog)

If you're a frequent reader, you'll surely have noticed the drop-off in posting frequency lately. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I could sit here and compile a list of excuses that would be alternatingly sensible and pathetic, but I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to highlight a trend that has certainly impacted the way that I think and write lately, one that's more worrying to me than my own personal laziness.

As Schmedlap has noted before (several times, probably), most of us don't read national security blogs or follow security analysts and commentators on Twitter in order to get our daily dose of partisan domestic politics. I completely agree with him on this one. I'm not particularly interested in what my dentist has to say about gay marriage, or how my rugby coach feels about constitutional interpretation, or really even what my colleagues in the office have to say about the stimulus bill. Domestic politics, as everyone knows, are right alongside religion as just one of those things you don't generally want to get into with people you don't know very well. Ideology, upbringing, socioeconomic class, ethno-linguistic group, etc etc -- there are a whole bunch of factors that impact an individual's politics and often make that class of beliefs entirely obscure to reason and rational argument, so it's usually best to just skip the whole thing.

Our present problem is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to talk about national security without brushing up against politics. The two subjects have never been entirely firewalled from one another, of course; the way people felt about the country's general approach to the Soviet Union during the Cold War was largely informed by questions of ideology, and a big chunk of the security issues that have sprung out of the stultifyingly-labeled "post-9/11 era" have broken along party or ideological lines. It's sort of the very nature of a world in which we view "homeland security" as an extension of national defense, really. We've had the luxury as Americans, in our relative geographic isolation, of viewing the physical security of our territory as almost an afterthought to the category of issues that we discuss under the heading of "national defense"; this latter subject mostly pertains to forward defense, or the defense and/or protection of American interests and installations abroad. September 11th changed that to some degree, but the politicization of terrorism and security in the intervening decade has done far more to bring down that wall of separation. Security demagoguery and the easy, thoughtless employment of scare tactics mean that every issue has a public safety component -- even immigration and the construction of houses of worship.

So why is this a big deal now, you're wondering? Well, hopefully you're not wondering, because it's pretty obvious. The Park51/"Ground Zero Mosque" controversy -- along with recent poll results showing that a significant chunk of Americans (and a near-majority of Republicans) are confused about the president's professed faith -- has offered an interesting window into the way that ethno-sectarian bias and amateur theology inform the politics of many, many putatively "scared" Americans. The way that so many national political leaders (on both sides of the aisle, I should note) have hewed to simple nativist narratives and trampled on the true meaning of the American political ideal has driven home for me just precisely how inextricable politics are from the national conversation about security and defense. Just this morning I had the unfortunate experience of overhearing half an hour of CSPAN Radio's "American Journal" on the subject of immigration and the border fence, and the ease with which so many callers are willing to declare an occasionally porous border to be a "national security issue" or a "problem for the military" or a "massive opportunity for terrorists" has helped to underline this fact.

While the blog has suffered, I'm spending a lot more time lately expressing my feelings about all of this on Twitter. That's not necessarily a good thing for the blog, because it keeps me from writing longer-form things on occasion, but it's allowed me to broaden the network of people with whom I interact and to get a two-way exchange going instead of just screaming into the wind. I've met a number of really interesting people and been exposed to issues, opinion, and analysis that I otherwise wouldn't have been. It also means that my thinking and writing have reached a slightly greater audience, and some of those people are really mostly politics people who just like a side of national security in the morning. (This has the added effect of sometimes delivering ego-boosting moments like the one I had on Friday, when Adam Serwer linked over here and called Ink Spots an "excellent national security blog you should be reading." Which is really cool, but sort of makes me point for me: Serwer blogs for the American Prospect -- a no-bones-about-it partisan publication -- on civil rights and criminal justice, two issues which now brush up against national security but are very definitely not a part of my area of so-called expertise.) That's fine, and I enjoy the exchange, but I'm not sure it's helped in the big picture. I also fear that the self-selection of blog reading exists at an accelerated, micro-level with Twitter, and so I'm hearing and seeing and talking with a whole lot of people with whom I already generally agree.

Anyway, this is long enough, so here's the tl;dr version of everything you see above: It's hard to talk about how to defend this country and advance its interests when it seems the very nature of what this country is and what it will be in the future is in question. More than any other excuses I can make about being busy at work or harried at home or travel or other priorities, I keep coming back to this: It's just not very fun right now.

BRIEFLY ADDED: Just after posting this, I read this column by E.J. Dionne. I was expecting to hate it, but it actually turned out to be pretty good. The most interesting part: in criticizing the president's disdain for "politicking," Dionne writes that "[i]n a democracy, separating governing from 'politicking' is impossible. 'Politicking' is nothing less than the ongoing effort to persuade free citizens of the merits of a set of ideas, policies and decisions."

Then I saw a tweet by Patrick Barry in response to this post: "Sadly, greatest near-term [national security] challenge may be moving past divisive shouting that prevents real debate on security." Which is a sentiment that I generally agree with.

But here's the problem: if Dionne is right (and I think he makes a compelling case), then partisanship and division is essential to the proper functioning of the American polity. But it just doesn't work for national security, and what seems to have been the tacit historical acceptance of that fact by all parties to the conversation is now being ignored.

On counter-terror financing

If Abu Muqawama and Ink Spots didn't solidify it already, this ought to cement the Washington Irish as the go-to rugby club for defense and security analysis: teammate Bob Guido published a paper in SWJ yesterday that seems like just about the best resource I've seen lately on the subject of U.S. efforts to interdict al-Qaeda financing.

U.S. Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing: Progress Made and Future Challenges

by Robert M. Guido

Download the Full Article (pdf): U.S. Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing

The United States and the international community have made great strides against al Qaeda since September 11, and counter-terrorist financing policies will remain a vital component of future efforts. The successes in tightening and shoring up the international financial system in the post-September 11 era, however, cannot be taken for granted. Al Qaeda and its affiliates have shown remarkable resilience and an ability to structurally evolve to survive the best efforts of the international community. To maintain progress in squeezing al Qaeda’s finance, governments will need to continually adapt counter-terrorist financing policies to address the simpler but untraceable methods of moving cash and assets such as hawala, and work collaboratively to combat alternative methods of finance that capitalize on the ever-present and growing field of international criminal activity.

Check it out -- a great resource on an under-studied subject, with excellent sourcing for those who want to dig deeper. (And I'm not just saying this because Guido's a friend!)

Some insights on "old" and "new" terrorism

Mike Innes has a great interview up on Current Intelligence with Richard Huffman, the publisher and editor of Baader-Meinhof.com. I'll admit I'd never visited Huffman's site before, but it's a fantastic resource on the German terror group, and I'd encourage you to check it out. You should also read Mike's interview, which contains some really interesting bits.

[Huffman:] What is interesting to me is that little of the current research and exploration of the Baader-Meinhof era draws any parallels to our modern terrorism challenges; because to me this is an area ripe for exploration. People don't seem to realize that there was a "War on Terror" 35 years ago that offers fairly stunning parallels to our modern "war on terror." Like in America, Germany pushed through dozens of anti-terrorism laws that curbed civil liberties in crucial ways, yet ultimately seemed to have little actual effect on stopping terrorism. Torture (or "enhanced interrogation techniques")? Check. A right wing media empire that rose to prominence and profits by beating the anti-terrorism drum? Check. Taking the criminal prosecution of the terrorists out of the standard court system? Check. Using the struggle against terrorism to build up police and military budgets? Check. The mantra after 9/11 was always "this is different." New rules need to apply. We need to reconsider our old values concerning civil liberties etc., to address this never-before-seen threat. I would argue that not only had it ALL been seen before, but it was within our lifetimes.

For me, the coolest thing about the whole deal is that this is just some dude who got interested in something and now runs basically the best online resource on this subject on the planet. It tells you something about the incredible diversity of the internet, but also about the exponential multiplication in analytical power that this resource offers us. Of course, the tools for sorting wheat from chaff haven't quite evolved at the same pace, but that's a whole other story (and something I've been thinking about a lot lately). So for now, just take my word for it: this is worth reading.

On the reactionary incoherence of our terrorism policy

1. Two suicide bombers detonated themselves on the Moscow metro this morning, killing at least 37 people and injuring dozens more.

2. "In response to the Moscow bombings, the NYPD is increasing police coverage of the New York City subway system," according to department spokeman Lieutenant John Grimpel.

3. The bombings cited in (1) took place in the Lubyanka and Park Kultury stations, each approximately 4,600 miles from Manhattan. Early reports suggest that these acts of terrorism were perpetrated by separatists from the Russian Caucasus, probably Chechen.

4. New York city does not have a Chechnya policy.

Iranian rebel leader received U.S. backing

Oh, no, wait, that's just what he told Iranian authorities after he'd been captured and likely tortured.

Sunni Muslim rebel leader Abdul Malik Rigi, arrested Tuesday by Iran, said the United States had offered to provide him with a base, cash and weapons, according to Iranian state television, which showed him purportedly making the admissions.

Iranian authorities said Rigi's group, Jundallah, was responsible for several deadly attacks in southeastern Iran and is backed by the United States. They said he was provided with an Afghan passport and had been at a U.S. base in Afghanistan 24 hours before the arrest.

U.S. officials, of course, deny anything of the sort.

While I think this guy would probably tell his government tormentors just about anything they wanted to hear, it's fair to note that there were rumblings during the prior administration that the U.S. ought to support Jundullah. Here's what Bob Baer had to say about that in Time last October, after a suspected Jundullah bomb had killed IRGC leadership alongside a number of other people:

"American intelligence has also had contact with Jundullah. But that contact, as Iran almost certainly knows, was confined to intelligence-gathering on the country," Robert Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer wrote on the Time.com, IRNA reported early on Saturday.

However, he noted that the US-Jundullah relationship "was never formalized, and contact was sporadic."

The news comes amid US denial of any involvement in a recent terrorist attack in Sistan-Baluchestan province in southeastern Iran, which Jundullah claimed responsibility for.

"I've been told that the Bush Administration at one point considered Jundullah as a piece in a covert-action campaign against Iran, but the idea was quickly dropped because Jundullah was judged uncontrollable and too close to al-Qaeda. There was no way to be certain that Jundullah would not throw the bombs we paid for back at us," said the former CIA agent who is a columnist in the weekly, and very probably an advisor in the Middle East.

Baer also noted that Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has had relations with the Jundullah leader, Abdolmalek Rigi.

"Pakistani intelligence has indeed had contact with Jundullah over the years, but there's no good evidence that Pakistan created Jundullah from scratch. And there's certainly no evidence that Pakistan ordered the attack," Baer said in reference to the terrorist attack that took place in Iran on Sunday, October 18, which killed 42 people including the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps commanders.

There are a million good reasons why our association with Jundullah should never have progressed beyond the point where it apparently stopped (according to Baer), so this explanation has a ring of truth. That the Iranian regime would try to associate Rigi with the U.S. is about as surprising as it is compelling, which is to say not at all.

Thanks, that was useful

Maybe it is a natural backlash after years of over-dramatic reporting on the then-called Global War on Terror, or the sign that John Mueller is winning hearts and minds, but there have been an interesting number of articles out there on how the terrorist threat is largely overestimated. It certainly is in some cases, but pushing this point to the extreme makes for rather absurd articles. a Foreign Policy blog post on “Drugs, Failed States, and Terrorists. Oh My” on the Foreign Policy blog criticizes United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa for stating that:

“‘There is more than just spotty evidence’ indicating a link between drug traffickers and terror groups.”

The post’s author goes on to add that:

“There seems to be an awful lot of hand-waving happening here. What we know is that drug smugglers are moving cocaine through West Africa, including regions where Al Qaeda linked militants also operate. This, in itself, may be cause for concern. But many, including prominent politicans, seem to be assuming that an established link exists when the only reported case of a suspected al Qaeda affiliate making a coke deal --again trotted out as evidence in this article -- was with someone who turned out to be a DEA agent. Until there's some more evidence, a little more cautious reporting might be in order.”

More cautious reporting is always welcome, but I fail to see why it would be needed here. It is an established fact that the FARC engages in, and benefits from, cocaine production and trafficking in South America. It is equally established that a number of AQIM members, particularly in its cells of Southern Algeria and Northern Mali, are as much traffickers as they are terrorists, and make a living of convoying cigarettes, arms, migrants, and drugs through the Sahara.

Now if cocaine trade has increased in West Africa as much in the past six years as UNODC reports, is it that much of a stretch to conclude that these two groups have financially benefited from at least part of this increase? Costa is stating the obvious here. The story that came out last December about the DEA investigation is interesting to get the details of how some deals are done, and what type of intermediaries get involved, but it does not teach us anything we did not know regarding the fact that a number of terrorist groups, in West Africa and elsewhere, gets funded through drug trafficking.

Oh, and one last sentence from this FP post:

“if al Qaeda is getting into the cocaine business, it would seem to suggest that the organization is moving outside its core competency in order to raise money”

This completely neglects the fact that there is not one Al Qaeda in this part of the world. AQIM is remotely linked to AQ central, and is itself largely divided between competing cells and leaders with different levels of ideological commitment and strategic priorities. Trafficking all sorts of goods, including drugs, has always been a core competency of some of AQIM southern cells.

A couple more things on al-Qaeda

I wanted to highlight two more recent publications related to the theme I discussed in yesterday's post; really they're suited to go in that one -- I can't believe I didn't think to include them -- but I figured no one would notice if I just updated.

First is Steve Coll's brief Talk of the Town piece for last week's New Yorker, "Threats":

The attempted Christmas attack also put Al Qaeda’s resourcefulness on full display. In its third decade, under severe pressure, it has evolved into a jihadi version of an Internet-enabled direct-marketing corporation structured like Mary Kay, but with martyrdom in place of pink Cadillacs. Al Qaeda shifts shapes and seizes opportunities, characteristics that argue for its longevity. It will be able to wreak havoc periodically for as long as it can recruit suicide bombers and well-educated talent, as it has done consistently.

Yet Al Qaeda is also weakening. Osama bin Laden sought to lead the vanguard of a spreading revolution. Instead, he and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hunkered down, presumably along the Afghan-Pakistani border, surrounded by only about two hundred hard-core followers. Their adherents in Yemen and Africa number no more than a few thousand. Al Qaeda in Iraq is a tiny fragment of its former self. Bin Laden’s relations with the Taliban seem brittle. Unlike Hezbollah, Al Qaeda provides no social services and thus has built no political movement. Unlike Hamas, its bloody nihilism has attracted no states that are willing to defend its legitimacy. In a world of at least one and a half billion Muslims, this does not a revolution, or even a vanguard, make.

Next is Thomas Rid's most recent article for The Wilson Quarterly, "Cracks in the Jihad." This is a much more well-developed essay than Coll's, as you might imagine from the different format, and it expands on the same themes referenced in the passage I've cited above. Here's a highlight:

In the years since late 2001, when U.S. and coalition forces toppled the Taliban regime and all but destroyed Al Qaeda’s core organization in Afghan­istan, the bin Laden brand has been bleeding popularity across the Muslim world. The global jihad, as a result, has been torn by mounting internal tensions. Today, the holy war is set to slip into three distinct ideological and organizational niches. The U.S. surge in Afghanistan, whether successful or not, is likely to affect this development only marginally.

The first niche is occupied by local Islamist insurgencies, fueled by grievances against “apostate” regimes that are authoritarian, corrupt, or backed by “infidel” outside powers (or any combination of the three). Filling the second niche is terrorism-cum–organized crime, most visible in Afghanistan and Indonesia but also seen in Europe, fueled by narcotics, extortion, and other ordinary illicit activities. In the final niche are people who barely qualify as a group: young second- and third-generation Muslims in the diaspora who are engaged in a more amateurish but persistent holy war, fueled by their own complex personal discontents. Al Qaeda’s challenge is to encompass the jihadis who drift to the criminal and eccentric fringe while keeping alive its appeal to the Muslim mainstream and a rhetoric of high aspiration and promise.

The most visible divide separates the local and global jihadis. Historically, Islamist groups tended to bud locally, and assumed a global outlook only later, if they did so at all. All the groups that have been affiliated with Al Qaeda either predate the birth of the global jihad in the early 1990s or grew later out of local causes and concerns, only subsequently attaching the bin Laden logo. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, for example, started out in 1998 as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, an offshoot of another militant group that had roots in Algeria’s vicious civil war during the early 1990s. Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba, the force allegedly behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 170 people, was formed in the 1990s to fight for a united Kashmir under Pakistani rule. In Somalia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, the Al Qaeda brand has been attractive to groups born out of local concerns.

By joining Al Qaeda and stepping up violence, local insurgents have long risked placing themselves on the target lists of governments and law enforcement organizations. More recently, however, they have run what may be an even more consequential risk, that of removing themselves from the social mainstream and losing popular support...

Rid explores the local/global split and briefly touches on takfir (there's really a LOT in common with Bobby's thesis that I mentioned yesterday); this obviously overlaps significantly with the ideas I sort of inelegantly explored in the post about Yemen, too.

So in short, go read!

Franchise vs. conglomerate, strategy vs. ideology, IO vs. material gain

While this Yemen thing is at the top of the news, I think it's worth taking a look at a couple of different things on the subject of al-Qaeda's organization, direction, and strategy. A lot of people are working on the question of how meaningful the links are between AQ Central and its affiliates; I don't have anything to offer on this, but I'd direct you towards a couple of posts from Josh McLaughlin at al-Sahwa:

Al Qaeda: Franchise or Conglomerate?, 10 January

A Follow-up to "Al Qaeda: Franchise or Conglomerate?" Comments, 11 January

Also worth checking out another al-Sahwa post, this one from DP: AQAP & A Central Question We Must Ask, 08 January.

All in all, al-Sahwa is doing really great stuff on this subject, so check them out.

I also want to direct your attention to something else that I've previously linked to in passing: a friend's Masters thesis on the question of how well AQ and Associated Movements' actions harmonize with their stated strategic goals, and on the importance of ideology within the operational construct of what he calls the Global Jihadist Movement.

To Kill or Not to Kill - The Global Jihadist Movement and the Doctrine of Takfir, Robert A. Williams, University of St Andrews

Here's the abstract:

Since 9/11, many within Western defense and counterterrorism communities have approached al-Qaeda simply as an operational problem with only scant attention paid to the ideology behind their operations. This study intends to partially remedy this deficiency by analyzing how a portion of jihadist ideology—the doctrine of takfir—has been interpreted and implemented organizationally and strategically by the post 9/11 Global Jihadist Movement (GJM). Drawing on the theory of Netwar, this study examines the historical and contemporary jihadist narratives of takfir, the place of takfir in the organizational strategies laid out by GJM strategists, and the implementation of takfir by a GJM-affiliated group, al-Qaeda in Iraq. From this analysis it is concluded that disagreements within the GJM over the definition and implementation of takfir are emblematic of greater fissures within the movement at large.

Like I said, Bobby's a friend of mine, but this is really outstanding and ground-breaking work. He got some great feedback from Dave Kilcullen, who has really been responsible for popularizing the "takfiri" concept in the West. I know it's a bit long for train reading, probably (59 pages), but you should check it out.